That’s cool, but in my experience if you get to the OOM killer then 80% of the time it’s too late and your system is basically dead. My laptop hard reboots most of the time when this happens.
Hopefully it works with the early-OOM hacks.
99% of the time, it’s my browser, so I ended up writing a script that watches memory used. If it reaches 95%, it throws a warning, and 98% force kills my browser. I’d rather that happen than my entire system lock up and have to hard reboot.
There’s a “proper” version of this hack called early oom. I haven’t used it though and now that I look at it it seems like it uses the same completely broken “guess which process to kill, who cares if it’s
init
” system that the normal oom killer uses so your solution sounds better.Is it so hard to just pause the system and ask the user which app to kill?
That’s sweet. I always used to have this problem with my memory running out, I fixed it by getting a shit load of RAM.
I have 32 GB but it’s not enough. Try opening 8 instances of VSCode, Firefox and Chrome with a few dozen tabs. Unfortunately my laptop doesn’t support 64 GB of RAM.
I know your pain. My work laptop only has 32 GB. Sometimes I have to run at least 4 to 5 instances across vs code, visual studio, and such. I wish I could use my home computer instead because that has 128 GB of RAM.
But if you’re filling up all RAM and swap, either you needed to upgrade a while ago, or you’re doing something wrong.
Not necessarily. When Ubuntu 22.04 had an issue where systemd-oomd was killing apps that touched the swap, something like this notification would have cleared up a lot of confusion from end users, myself included.
Or your OS* is doing something wrong 😆
OS stands for “Oh Shit!”